The present invention relates to searching audio data. In particular, the present invention relates to matching an input search query within audio data.
The increasing storage capacity and processing capabilities of computers has led to the further development of applications that utilize and store audio data. These applications store audio and video data of voicemails, lectures, meetings, interviews and broadcasts. With a large amount of audio data, methods have been devised to search and retrieve keywords within the audio data.
In some instances, a speech recognizer processes audio data to identify words therein. Search queries can then be matched to recognized words in the audio data. This approach, however, requires a large vocabulary and is not adept to recognizing specialized keywords, such as person and place names. Other approaches utilize phonemes to match search queries. In some phoneme-based approaches, language knowledge utilized by respective systems is limited and the amount of data needed to run the systems is large. As a result, a system that utilizes language knowledge of adequate size is needed for searching of audio data.